


daughters of liberty

by stellamayfairs



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-16
Updated: 2018-05-16
Packaged: 2019-05-07 19:03:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 800
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14677497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellamayfairs/pseuds/stellamayfairs
Summary: King Maric has vanished and the country has fallen into a chaos that threatens to consume them, with only the future queen left to oversee it. Maker save Ferelden from the men that would rule it.





	daughters of liberty

**Author's Note:**

> This the first of short pieces meant to accompany my main work, Though the Heavens Fall. Consider it a self-indulgent extra.
> 
> (Edited to fix annoying typos, remind me to start proofreading, oh my god)

She was in Orlais when the king vanished.  
The letter had not been sent to her; intercepted, as most documents she laid her eyes on her were.  
But then, Anora had always known her well.  
Two words. That was all it took.  
Come home.

Every day Anora rose at sunrise, and every day brought another headache, another heartache, another crisis that would slip through the cracks if she deigned to rest.  
One day, they would say that she had always reigned in Cailan’s name.  
The truth is that it began much sooner.

It was then that Gwaren was truly abandoned, never to be fully reclaimed.  
It would never be the same again.  
It was then that a piece of Loghain was lost as surely as Maric was, never to be fully restored.  
He would never be the same again.

Slowly at first, then rapidly, then alarmingly, the treasury was emptied.  
Everyone turned a blind eye as their country was driven towards utter ruin.  
Everyone but Anora, who spent sleepless nights as candle after candle consumed itself to illuminate the figures before her.  
Who else was there?

Eamon haunted the halls of the Denerim palace like a malevolent ghost.  
Cailan became a phantom himself, vanishing for days at a time without explanation and returning bloodied and bruised and as broken externally as surely as his insides.  
Their disembodied voices would echo violently through the halls.  
He deserves to know, Cailan would scream. He deserves to be here.  
Anora never bothered to hear Eamon’s response. She already knew what it would be.

Cailan would come to her some nights, looking as bloodless as he felt gutless.  
She didn’t ask him who he was seeking out. She already knew. She didn’t ask why. She knew that, too.  
A foolish notion. One it was fortunate her father never heard.  
Did she understand it? Of course she did. She’d thought of it herself, more than once.  
The price of decorum was becoming too high.

She never mentioned this to Cailan.  
She never mentioned the way she painstakingly hacked at ledgers every night, trying to find money where it didn’t exist, trying to move money from where it wouldn’t be missed.  
It would always be missed.

Fergus met his sister on the docks of Highever.  
She never would have been placed for a Fereldan woman then, with perfumed tresses past her waist, corset pulled tightly across an overflowing bosom, luxury silks falling from her shoulders.  
But the girl who threw herself over the side and plunged into the depths, who came bursting to the surface where the water shallowed, who ran through the waist deep sea, emerging as quickly as her legs could carry her, who hiked her skirts up past her knees, who came flying into his arms and threw her arms around his neck, Cousland laurel exposed on the pendant that hung around her throat.  
That girl was more Fereldan than the best of them.

Loghain was half-mad with grief, half-mad with bloodthirst.  
He spoke of war with Orlais, of vengeance, of bringing Maric back, hostage or martyr that he was.  
He took the last of the gold, he took the last of the stores, he took the last of his men, took all that was left of the Ferelden navy despite Eleanor Cousland’s advice.  
It was Anora who stopped him in the end, flying after him in her bare feet, hair wild and undone, shouting, commanding, pleading for him not to go.  
Loghain crumpled then, and for the first time, the last time, sobbed in his only child’s arms.

How does one have a funeral with no body? How does one deliver a eulogy for a man never found dead?  
They gathered still on the docks of Denerim, to set fire to an empty casket.  
Anora dressed herself in her house’s colors that day, and as she and her father joined the funeral procession, no one questioned that Gwaren’s colors were the colors of mourning.

The cruel machinations of fate placed Anora beside her betrothed's mistress,  
Returned from enemy territory by a plea written in her own hand,  
The hand that had, quite inexplicably, clung to Síle’s as a lifeline.  
They neither liked nor trusted each other, but there they stood, tethered by a thread that bound them together, unwittingly, unwillingly.  
The teryns’ daughters, the daughters of Ferelden, the daughters of the liberty their fathers had bled for.  
That Maric had bled for.

Ferelden shall never see his kind again, they said.  
Anora would never vocalize her thought, that Ferelden would never survive another of his kind.  
Ferelden would never survive Cailan alone.  
Her eyes rested on girl with ebony hair and amber eyes and knew she was not alone in her thoughts.

Maker save Ferelden from the men who would rule it.


End file.
